Cotner-Bevington Corporation was a coach builder formed in 1959 in when when Comet Coach Company of Memphis, Tennessee sold the rights to the Comet name to Ford Motor Company, and moved 68 miles north to a new factory in Blytheville, Arkansas.
One of Comet’s three owners, Jack Pinner, remained in the Memphis area and opened Pinner Coach Co. in Olive Branch, Mississippi while the remaining owners—Waldo J. Cotner and Robert Bevington, renamed the coach building firm after themselves.
While having built Chevrolet and Buick based coaches from 1959-1962, the company was most widely known for specializing in Oldsmobiles.
Initially more of a conversion firm rather than a specialized coach builder, Cotner-Bevington’s acquisition by DIVCO-Wayne Corp in 1965 sought to change that by adopting manufacturing processes used by the major coach builders such as standardizing base coach specifications and option packages.
Cotner-Bevington served as a budget alternative to DIVCO-Wayne’s standard bearing Miller-Meteor brand and its Cadillac commercial chassis coaches, and from then on built cars on the full-size Oldmosbile 98 chassis exclusively, offering a full range of hearses, ambulances, and combination cars.
The 1973 EMS Systems Act (which was passed in 1974 and enacted in 1978) spelled doom for passenger car based ambulances in favor of truck and van based modular ambulances. DIVCO-Wayne shuttered Cotner-Bevington at the end of the 1975 model year, and just four years later its sister division, Miller-Meteor would close its doors as well.
Thank you to Mark Theobald at coachbuilt.com for the history and Stephen Everhart of Davidson Funeral Home for the images.
